First Virtual Holdings Corp, not to be confused with Ralph Ungermann’s First Virtual Corp, reckons it has solved the problem of secure credit card payment over the internet with its VirtualPIN system. Two heavyweights, First Data Corp, Hackensack, New Jersey and General Electric Co Inc’s GE Capital, Stamford, Connecticut, seem to agree. With First USA Paymentech Inc, they have together invested a total of $12.5m in First Virtual. First USA is a credit card processing company and First Data has a credit card processing operation. With the VirtualPIN system, customers register their credit card number just once over a secure telephone line, and the customer is allocated a VirtualPIN, which is used thereafter as the identifier in all transactions, so that the credit card number is never sent over the internet. The system automates the buying process from initial information, outbound offer, purchase order, confirmation, credit verification, transaction settlement and fulfillment. The VirtualPIN unlocks the customer’s database record including identity, electronic mail address and personal, demographic, shipping and financial information. First Virtual launched the system two years ago, and has now refined it with an extension called Virtual Tags, Java applets that enable merchants to embed the VirtualPIN transaction process directly into multimedia advertisements, which can include animation, sound and video clips. Click on the appropriate area of the ad, and the entire selling, payment and delivery process is completely automated to the point where you sign for the goods on delivery. The buyer and the merchant both need the First Virtual software – and only 175,000 customers and 2,500 merchants have it so far, but w ith the heavyweight backing, it seems likely to increase rapidly. Sun Microsystems Inc, Electronic Data Systems Corp, Science Applications International Corp and Sybase Inc collaborated on the hardware and the software that makes the system work.
